Still uphill fight for equal chance

Twitter latest way men take shots at women in sports

Published 10:08 pm, Thursday, April 28, 2016

The hatred that arrives rapid-fire into their social media accounts is so personal and acidic that it could sear through even the thickest skin.

Messages from men who said they wanted them dead. Or raped. Or beaten by their boyfriends.

So Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain — these two friends and Chicago-based sports journalists who receive these notes on nearly a daily basis — decided to address it publicly. They agreed to be featured in a video highlighting some of the meanest, cruelest messages they've received on Twitter.

In the video, produced by Just Not Sports and posted Tuesday, men sat across from DiCaro, a radio host and Sports Illustrated reporter, and Spain, an espnW reporter and ESPN Radio host. These men were not the ones who had sent the tweets; they were just friends of the producers asked to read selected ones sent to the women, sight unseen, and it was kind of like Jimmy Kimmel's mean tweets comedy bit. Except the comedy part. The tweets they had to read included, "You need to be hit in the head with a hockey puck and killed" and "Hopefully, this skank Julie DiCaro is Bill Cosby's next victim."

When I watched the video, which spread at light speed across the Internet, I wasn't shocked, or even surprised. Female sportswriters get these notes, in many forums: Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, email.

Within our small sorority, we female sports journalists don't talk about these written assaults much. We all know that they exist and that they'll just keep coming, as if it's part of the job description.

"Men get mean comments, too, but I think the context of it is quite different for women," Spain said. "It's not just, like, 'You're an idiot, and I'm mad at you for your opinion.' It's: 'I hate you because you are in a space that I don't want you in. I come to sports to get away from women. Why don't you take your top off and just make me lunch?' "

It used to take at least a few days for disturbed readers to get their cruel points across — that slap in the face via snail mail.

When I first became a sportswriter, nearly two decades ago, a reader sent me a letter, with no return address on the envelope, week after week. On a single white sheet of paper, the reader pasted a photo of me that ran with my newspaper column. Below that were comments about my face, hairstyle and figure and how, as a woman, I should be cooking and having babies instead of invading men's territory to write about sports. How I needed to quit my job and get out of town. Or else.

Creepy. But I just filed the letters away, kept my head down and moved on.

I had heard the stories of the women who came before me and what they had to go through to cover sports. Journalists like Lisa Olson, who had been with The Boston Herald. In 1990, she said she had been harassed in the locker room while covering the New England Patriots. What followed her accusations was brutal: Death threats. Slashed tires. Naked blow-up "Lisa" dolls tossed around the stands at games. Her apartment was burglarized. In the end, she had to move to Australia to get away from the abuse.

So the notes I received from creepy readers didn't seem so bad at all. This, I thought, was the deal for women in sports. I had been an athlete. You had to be tough to make it. I could take it.

Can't I just ignore all of it? That's not easy to do now that news organizations expect reporters to build a social-media presence and engage with readers. Especially on Twitter. In the sports community, Twitter is the social hub of choice for athletes, fans and journalists — a giant water cooler in the cloud where people share opinions and ideas.

It can be a great place to network. It can also be a hostile place. Harassers can hide in anonymity and strike in a millisecond.

DiCaro, a former family law and criminal lawyer, said a man once sent her avalanches of troublesome messages on social media, for hours a day, as he stalked her. Another man, after DiCaro began writing about the rape accusations against Chicago Blackhawks forward Patrick Kane, sent DiCaro a series of tweets, talking about her being killed and raped. He said she would be in trouble the next time he was in Chicago.

DiCaro and Spain say 90 percent of the response on Twitter to their video has been positive. But the remaining 10 percent, the sad and sorry 10 percent, didn't get the point.

One person on Twitter told Spain, "please kill yourself I will provide the bleach."